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Ex-CIA Director: We're Not Doing Nearly Enough To Protect Against the EMP Threat
An anonymous reader writes: Last week saw the release of an open letter written to President Obama by a committee of notable political, security and defense experts — which includes past and present members of Congress, ambassadors, CIA directors, and others — on the country's concerning level of vulnerability to a natural or man-made Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). An EMP has very real potential for crippling much of our electrical grid instantaneously. Not only would that immediately throw the social order into chaos, but the timeline to repair and restart the grid in most estimated scenarios would take months to a year or more.
Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry said, "Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country. ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid. This is unusual, because in the case of every other critical infrastructure, there's an agency in the U.S. government that can require them to take actions for public safety. For example, the Food & Drug Administration can order certain medicines kept off shelves to protect the public safety. ... The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission doesn't have those legal powers or authorities."
Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry said, "Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country. ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid. This is unusual, because in the case of every other critical infrastructure, there's an agency in the U.S. government that can require them to take actions for public safety. For example, the Food & Drug Administration can order certain medicines kept off shelves to protect the public safety. ... The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission doesn't have those legal powers or authorities."
From TFA.
And, the NERC, which owns half of K Street and has got very deep pockets, has been successful in lobbying against legislation like the Grid Act and the SHIELD Act, both bipartisan bills supported almost unanimously by Democrats and Republicans. They've been able to stall for years and keep these bills held up. One time when we got a bill passed: the Grid Act actually, in 2010, unanimously passed the House. Everybody supported it. But Washington is so broken, one senator put a hold on a bill - if they know which senator to buy, they can buy that one senator and the person can put a hold on the bill so it can't come to the floor for a vote and they can do it anonymously. The senator doesn't have to identify themselves. So, you never know who stopped the bill.
The CIA has its own airforce: a modest percentage of the drone raids are carried out by JSOC or some other DoD element; but one of the reasons that 'drones' are more controversial than ordinary ground attack aircraft is that the expansion of drone warfare was aggressively used by the CIA to expand the effective size of their 'air force', so when you see 'drone' it's much more likely that the story is 'the CIA decided to kill somebody, identity classified, because of evidence(classified) evaluated according to a classified standard of evidence', rather than it being a conventional wartime air force or army activity.
Spooks still don't dogfight; but they have plenty of both surveillance and ground attack aircraft.
But defending against terrorists and rogue states with EMP weapons is so sexy compared to boring civil engineering that would improve infrastructure quality and resilience against tedious and soggy natural disasters!
Plus, EMP is fairly exotic, so we can probably spin it into a bunch of more or less open-ended R&D contracts, while most civil engineering is comparatively mature; and the biggest challenge is providing decades of solid, reliable, governance and room for qualified engineers to work without constant political interference. Where's the fun in that?
Q: Why are we just talking about it and why hasn't the problem been fixed?
Dr. Pry: Okay. Well, the short answer to that is itâ(TM)s called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They are basically the representativeâ" they used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities [...] agency in the U.S. government [...] protect the public safety
Woolsey: [mumble mumble THEY could make a bomb]
I call NO THANKS on this transparent attempt to create yet another regulatory agency arm of DHS, and Jen Bawden who may be as concerned as I am about the grid, but sounds like she wants a boxcar on the gravy train. Mumble mumble THEY could come by boat she says. Then Woolsey and Pry go so far as to declare NERC 'worthless'. Sounds like a gub'mint involvement power grab that has little to do with engineering. To find out how little a political initiative like this will actually improve the grid, just go ahead and create this new agency, just like all the other ones. Before long everyone will be working for the Federal Government and the economy will be supported by a single hot dog vendor in Wash DC. They'll spend their whole budget creating scary power point presentations about bad-people-threats, because they'd rather not go outside.
NERC is populated by people who don't mind going outside to look at things.
NERC does need a kick in the ass though. It needs to worry less about cyberattack (which conveniently does not require you to go outside) and put a more concentrated effort into black start capability --- which is the ability (through planned procedures and simulation) to bring up the grid from complete power down This involves the identification of islands and what are called 'black start resources', stations that can power up first and help others to start. See the working document on EOP-005-x. Whatever the disaster and no matter how pervasive its effects, the first priority needs to be a firm plan for getting things going again and isolating sections that need replacement parts.
Do not let that Carrington Event stuff terrify you too deeply. In the 1859 small gauge telegraph wires were strung hundreds of miles to make the perfect EMP antenna, and its effects were what could be expected of a system that was on no way designed to withstand induced EMF. The modern grid is a lightning-arresting monster of conductor. Many old or improperly maintained components may fail in places, but it's not some slate-wiper, the greatest challenge will be merely to isolate problems and restart the rest.
Unfortunately when it comes to telephone communication this generation is pretty well screwed by a series of shitty little compromises over 30 years that will result in NO PHONES WORKING a week after major sections of the grid has gone dark, no matter if there are portable generators handy. POTS is gone, control has been centralized to distant places. Don't expect that cell tower to let you call your neighbor.
But the essential components and practice of the power grid remains the same as it was in the 70s, robust and reliable. If NERC would spend more time planning and training for black start capability, THAT is the best, possibly only, thing that would make a real difference.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.
That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding.
Yep, this guy is full of crap. The telling statement is: ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country.
That's very misleading. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a government agency that has powers to make rules regarding the grid. They decided that this is a highly technical industry, so they basically created the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to investigate potential issues, draft rules, and get the industry on board with them. FERC tells NERC which kind of rule they want, NERC drafts it. Then FERC decides if the draft rules should be made law. NERC doesn't have any legal powers to protect the grid, they are just a rulemaking organization. So the statement "no part of the U.S. government that has legal powers to order them to protect the grid" is very misleading since NERC doesn't have the power to protect the grid anyway. That's FERC's job.
If NERC is in the industry's pocket, they aren't in it very deep. They have made rules regarding cybersecurity and IT systems that have cost utilities hundreds of thousands (small utilities) to millions (large utilities). Just look at some of their recent filings (proposed rules.) Especially this one - The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Report on the Potential Impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Clean Power Plan—Chapter 7 Reliability Assurance Mechanism. If NERC was in the industry's pocket, this would be some drivel about how the EPA's clean power plan was rubbish. It isn't. It basically just says "hey this EPA plan might affect grid reliability, we better develop a metric to measure grid reliability". It's very reasonable and obviously written by an engineer, not a lobbyist.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Only costs a few times more to bury them but you won't need to service it for a century! Srsly.
More like 10 times in the country, and much more in the city. I used to work in this industry, did you?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You do not know how nuclear EMP works. It's a result of three main components, two of which require direct interaction with ionosphere . Without this interaction, you're limited to approximately 10-15 km range in your EMP blast effect and these components do not cause inward resonance with Earth's magnetic field, which is where the strength and range comes from.
This is pretty much the same range that kinetic nuclear shockwave detonation would wipe out anyway.
Relevant reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and its sources.